Some people want church to be a super-comfortable shelter from the world: but without friction, no fragrance! Listen here.
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed on a Christian radio program. When the host asked me about my childhood, I said that it had been church all the way, for which I was (now) incredibly grateful. The host told me he had also grown up in the church and said it was a great blessing ‘having a sheltered upbringing and a peaceful home life and all that sort of thing …’
My perverse mind immediately flashed to the times, plural, that a little Cambodian boy had gone berserk in our backyard and chased me while swinging a rake. He was triggered by our garden tools to re-enact the way his father had been murdered in his presence by the Khmer Rouge.
Our church was two-thirds Anglo and one-third Cambodian, and I thought about how tricky it was to hold bilingual services, or to be polite across cultures. Do you eat everything on your plate, or do you leave a few mouthfuls? Do you open a gift straightaway, or do you wait until the giver has left? Do you look a speaker in the eye, or do you avert your gaze as a sign of respect? There were different rules in different homes.
Later we moved to another church, and I remembered the tension of youth group there. The white kids turned up on chronos, or clock time, and the black kids at kairos, or spirit time, making it hard to know when to start events or go out on excursions. I remembered also how awkward I could feel around the homeless guys and the wildly successful professionals; I was a very shy teenager, and didn’t know how to build bridges up and down the social ladder.
I remembered the conflicts played out at church meetings, and the fierce conversations over morning tea. And I thought of our chaotic home life as my mother, a pastor, galloped around caring for people, organising church events, writing newsletters, hosting an endless stream of meetings and visitors and conversations in our home, and starting sermons in a screaming panic at 3am.
Sheltered? Peaceful? I tried not to laugh.
And yet the radio host’s comment was telling. Many churches, and many Christians, go to great lengths to erase difference. Friends of mine were publicly expelled from their church for their sexuality. Another friend was kicked out of her ‘good Christian home’ at 16 for the same reason. Some friends were told to keep their autistic kid away, because people found his quiet movements around the sanctuary too distracting. Still others I know were condemned from a pulpit for having a child with a disability: evidence, apparently, of parental sin.
Some churches insist members sign a statement of faith, or agree with the minister on everything. And my radio segment was drastically cut. I had observed that Christ is the only justification anybody needs, and that all are welcome, queer and otherwise, at God’s table; this, apparently, would have caused great offence to the listeners.
Difference, conflict, complexity, friction: we will go to great lengths to avoid them, and not just in the church. The whole technological project seems to be about smoothing our lives. We pick up our phones and they tell us the next song we should listen to, the person we should date, the nearest place that makes good coffee. They preference the ideas we favour in our social media feeds, and hide those with which we don’t want to engage. Our news is sourced from outlets whose politics we agree with; our podcasts are by people we already like. And particularly post-lockdown, many of us have stopped seeing those friends who are too difficult, too annoying or too inconvenient to be bothered with. At a very deep level, as a culture we seem to have rejected the idea that we should ever have to feel uncomfortable.
Which is all very well, but as relationships counsellor Esther Perel points out, this has consequences. We might think that removing difficulty, discomfort and the unknown would make us more at ease in the world, more confident, more relaxed. In fact it has the opposite effect. Maturity means accepting that some people and some things are difficult, and cannot be avoided or changed. It means making hard choices and living with the consequences. Maturity means learning to delay gratification, hold contradiction, and accept ambivalence. We can hold two utterly contradictory feelings about a person or situation at once; maturity means being able to live with this unresolved tension. And it means being able to turn towards the other and to recognise and serve their needs, checking our own needs and behaviours to do so.
But our society and our technology are infantilising us; they push us in the other direction. We are pushed away from discomfort and delay, and towards instant gratification. We are pushed away from the relational and communal and towards the private: the iPhone, the iMac, the personally tailored social media feed. Through lack of practice, many of us are losing the ability to live with contradiction or complexity, or to park our own needs for the sake of others.
And as the rough edges of our lives are sanded down and we exist more and more in our own little bubbles, what we are seeing is that people are becoming dramatically more anxious, more disengaged, more lonely and more filled with self-doubt.
To engage confidently and lovingly with the world takes practice. It takes rubbing up against people and ideas who are very different from ourselves. We need constant friction and challenge in order to know ourselves, our boundaries and our limits, to become comfortable in our own skins, and to reach relational maturity. This is true not only for individuals, but for the organisations and communities that they form.
I first came to Brunswick Baptist over thirty years ago, and I’ve stayed in loose contact ever since. My long experience of this congregation has always been one of profound diversity jostling together. It’s a church of many cultures, ages, backgrounds, and abilities; a church of diverse genders, sexualities, neurotypes and even faiths. It’s a church which has at times struggled to hold these differences, or to know how to care for each person’s needs; at times, it has not managed this very well.
For some, this failure has been a source of anger or frustration or shame but, because I’m a Bible geek, to me it’s an invitation to reflect on the church at Corinth. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the body of Christ as being made up *precisely* of difference. Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, have been brought together, baptised in the one Spirit to form one body.
This coming together hasn’t been easy. In fact, their differences are threatening to tear them apart. Some have declared they are disciples of the very Jewish Paul; others, of Apollos the Greek. The church is splitting into factions, threatening their witness to the gospel of love. So Paul is writing to them urgently, pushing them to see their diversity not as a reason for conflict, but as a gift of the Spirit; it is something to be cherished. He names their differences in background, culture, temperament and gifting, and argues that it is precisely this diversity which makes the body healthy.
‘If the foot should say, “Because I’m not a hand, I don’t belong to the body,”’ writes Paul, ‘that wouldn’t make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I’m not an eye, I don’t belong to the body,” that wouldn’t make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as God chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?’ (1 Cor. 12:14-19).
Paul is saying that the thing we call church *must* be profoundly diverse if it is to be healthy and whole. We don’t need 27 eyes, but a couple of eyes are useful for seeing, and an ear or two for listening. A hand is great at making things, and a foot is excellent for standing on: ideally, we have one or two of each. But, writes Paul, we particularly need the things that were never mentioned in the Victorian era. Things which are covered by fig leaves; things like ‘womb’ and ‘bowel’ and ‘stomach’; things Paul describes as shameful.
He reminds the Corinthians that every body needs things that aren’t high status in this world, the things we usually hide away: and that these things are critical to health. You can live without a hand, but it’s hard to process fats without a gall bladder. You can live without a leg, but a body without a healthy bowel will very soon sicken and die. In fact, the low-status no-account things are what keep the body functioning and healthy, and so we must treat these parts with enormous tenderness and respect.
Like Brunswick Baptist, the church at Corinth included many members who were not well regarded by the world. In fact, earlier in the letter, Paul observes that ‘God deliberately chose people that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses,’ so that God’s wisdom, not the world’s wisdom, and God’s power, not the world’s power, become known (1:26ff).
This all sounds very nice, but many of us here know what it means to be overlooked, exploited and abused. It means living with deep wells of grief. It means trauma and PTSD. It means chronic illness, and depression, and the inability to get out of bed some mornings. It means knowing, with Christ, what it is to be marginalised, rejected and shamed, and to carry those scars, those easily-opened wounds, everywhere we go. And so it means that some of us in the church have glaring needs, while others have been well supplied with the love and support we require in order to thrive.
How, then, does the church function? The simple fact is that church is not therapy, and not everybody’s needs or desires can be met. Paul knows this, too. So he makes it clear that the body’s priority is for the weaker, more vulnerable members who are so necessary to the body’s health; they are to be treated with the greatest honour and tenderness. In this way, he writes, everyone experiences care and the whole body thrives.
It’s very common to hear people announce that they are leaving the church because their needs aren’t being met. Sometimes, this is absolutely fair. Some churches seem contemptuous of difference, terrified of change, and uninterested in the pressing questions of our age, and so they have rendered themselves irrelevant, even harmful. But sometimes, it’s precisely because a church is diverse that people feel uncomfortable and leave. Jew, Gentile, slave, free, citizen, asylum seeker, queer, heteronormative, upper middle class, sub-working class, neurotypical, neurodivergent, healthy, sick and so on and so forth: a healthy church will embody them all, and it will not be comfortable.
Because we are not gathered here through the wisdom of the world. This is not iChurch, or iWorship, or iFaith. It’s not about having our personal desires met without interruption, frustration or discomfort. Church isn’t about living a sheltered or peaceful life, nor is it about ignoring or erasing the differences in the room.
Instead, this is a place where we join together to worship a loving God, the one who comes to us in the guise of a stranger and invites us to journey together and to grow in faith: and we do this precisely through experiencing diversity, complexity, frustration, even friction. For church is a place where we learn to love people we profoundly disagree with, who are shaped by forces very different to our own. It’s a place to sit with the deep ambivalence that we feel about others, and how we ourselves are in their presence. It’s a place where we turn towards others and join our lives with theirs, parking our own needs and desires from time to time in order to serve. And in all of this, it’s a place to grow into the maturity and wholeness and healing that comes when we are members of a profoundly diverse body.
I was talking through some of these ideas with my husband, Paul, who thirty years ago was church secretary here. He observed that, if we want to smell rosemary, we need to rub it between our fingers. It’s a crushed gum leaf which releases fragrance; ground coffee which smells so good.
In a letter to another church, the one in Ephesus, the Apostle Paul encourages people to ‘walk in love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God’ (Eph 5:2). With the Pauls, then, I encourage you to cherish your diversity as you jostle along together in love. Not a fake love, where relationships skim the surface and differences are erased and the ultimate value is niceness, but a Christlike love, with all its difficulty, its ambivalence, its woundedness, and its friction. For it is with friction that you come to know yourself in relationship to others; with friction that you grow in love. And it is with friction that you emit a fragrant offering to God, a pleasing aroma, a sweet-smelling savour. Ω
(And yes, everyone had some rosemary to rub and sniff during the service.)
Reflect: How have you rubbed up against difference? What have you learned about yourself and others? How has it helped you grow in love?
A reflection on 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 given to Brunswick Baptist Church on 22 September 2024 (off lection; this text is usually preached in Year C Epiphany 3) © Alison Sampson 2024. Drawing from an interview with Esther Perel on Your Undivided Attention here. Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash (edited). This reflection was prepared on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation in Poorneet Tadpole Season. This week, coupled dragonflies careen over every watercourse, and the air is soft and warm.
Alison and the whale 